Nanny Statists: Authoritarians From Both Sides Love A Good Moral Panic

Soft and sweet
Wise and wonderful
Oooh our mystical, magical nanny.

Today, I’m continuing the disgust for CA AB1043; previous revulsion is:

There’s just so much bad about it.

CA AB1043 is not just dumb, it’s also dangerous.

Firstly, and most importantly, because its only goal is to prevent a part of the population from accessing information; it mandates that every computer contain a mechanism for blocking part of the population from accessing information that the State decides they should not have access to.

This is bad, and wrong, and the State should absolutely not be allowed to do that.

It doesn’t matter what that information may be, it’s not the role of the State to tell the people what they can know or what they should think or say.

This is, after all, the entire idea behind the United States’ much vaunted First Amendment.

It’s not the State’s role to control what children can see.

That is the parents’ job.

And the State should not be interfering with parents’ ability to decide what material their children should have access to on their computers.

It really doesn’t matter that CA AB1043 does this badly.

It matters that it’s trying to do it at all.

Now, I would argue that this is already clearly unconstitutional since it constitutes a mechanism for “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”.

Computer code and software designs are also expressive forms of speech themselves, especially content filtering systems, so mandating that all computers provide a mechanism for censorship is compelling speech by the developers of these systems. And forbidding the publication of software without these controls is direct censorship.

While the current Constitution doesn’t specifically forbid this, the Supreme Court has ruled multiple times that compelling speech (especially political speech) is a form of “abridging” in the context of the First Amendment.

So CA AB1043 is arguably already unconstitutional.

But we should really update the Constitution to be more explicit in forbidding the State from attempting to control the flow of information among the people or in attempting to influence the opinions of the people in any way at all.

I doubt that any fixes like this can be made right now, of course, what with the fascist coup and masked goon squads roaming the streets and I don’t even know how many foreign military escapades and all.

But we really need to fix this.